Last night I attended Derek Thompson’s presentation “Economics and Influence in Digital Spaces.” I found this talk extremely interesting. Thompson started by talking about how companies that don’t charge users for their services, such as Google, Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram, are making a profit every year while companies who do charge for services, such as Uber and Lyft, are losing a lot of money. The reason for this is that these free websites make their money through advertising. Thompson said that advertising has contributed to misinformation being spread on sites like Google and Facebook because they will do anything for our attention.
Thompson also said that this idea goes all the way back to the 1830s, when a 23-year-old named Benjamin Day started a newspaper called the New York Sun, which only cost a penny and made the rest of its money through advertising. The New York Sun published a story about how scientists had seen people living on the moon. While this was obviously false, many readers believed it, including people who were very well educated and knew logically that it couldn’t be true. I thought it was very interesting that he used an example from the 1800s because we think of fake news as a problem that started with the rise of social media. Thompson also talked about how attention-based platforms like YouTube benefit extremists, and how easy it is for us to fall into their trap simply by clicking on videos in our “recommended for you” column.
His last point really resonated with me. He said that social media has caused a lot of anxiety in young people because we can now see how many options are out there for us, which seems like a good thing, but can be very overwhelming. It also gives us the ability to see what other people are doing at all times and compare ourselves. We know rationally that what other people put online is just the version of themselves that they want people to see, but it is still difficult not to compare yourself to what you see on social media.
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